The Mourning After Read Online Free Page B

into bed and taking his position defensively next to his wife.
    “I did the last two,” she’d counter.
    “I’m meeting a contractor in the morning.”
    “This is all your fault,” she stabs at him.
    “What the hell does that mean?” he asks and adds, “You’re crazy,” as he heads toward Chloe’s room where he will spend another evening on her pink carpeted floor while Levon listens next door.  His father ran a multimillion dollar real estate development company yet he couldn’t tame his size-two, reed-thin wife who could very easily fall over if one sneezed in her direction.  He was sure his great-great-grandfather, having built this house a million years ago, had no idea that the structure made it possible to eavesdrop simply by sitting up in bed.  The air vent near the ceiling above his head spilled out all their secrets, telling him of their suffering.  He once tried closing the silver flaps and woke up that night with beads of sweat trickling down his back, and he stood up on his bed and reopened the vents.
    His mom followed his dad into Chloe’s room that same night.  Levon knew this because her voice trailed behind his through the duct.
    “Are you kidding me?” she balked.  “What if the boys wake up and find you here? 
    “Then they’ll find me here.  I think they already see the fault lines in our marriage.”
    “And what’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
    “We’re breaking in two.”
    This was when his mother became hysterical.  His metaphors always preceded one of her eruptions.  Once, she would brag to her friends about the intellectual genius she married.  Now, his verbiage unnerved her, stripping her of solid footing.  Levon imagined her bobby pins flying across the room and springing off the wall.
    “I’m tired,” she started, “I’m so tired.”  The words slipped through the creases of breaths and whimpers.  “Why did this happen to us?”  Her words hung in the air, the thoughts too frightening to say out loud.  Finishing her thought would give credence to the next sentence, the harbinger of what was to come.  “I want it to go away, Craig.  Please make it all go away.”  She was sobbing now, and Levon wasn’t sure what she meant.  Did she want them to disappear?  He thinks his father might have interjected something, but he wasn’t sure—his voice was typically softer and harder to hear.  And then she began again, her cries rising and falling in measure with her despair. “I can’t take it anymore…I just can’t do this.”
    “Yes, you can,” his father said, raising his tone as if he intentionally wanted Levon to hear. 
    “I’m sick of your certainty,” she screamed.
    “We have no choice.”
    By then, Chloe was screaming a deafening wail, and Levon covered his ears with his pillow, drowning the sounds of everything that had gone so wrong.
    From his position on the bathroom floor, Levon reaches for a hanging towel and lowers his face into the fresh scent of Bounce.  He is tired of their arguments.  He is tired of missing David.  He is tired of holding everything inside.  He longs to be free.  He whispers the words to his favorite Everclear song:
    I close my eyes when I get too sad
    I think thoughts that I know are bad
    Close my eyes and I count to ten
    Hope it’s over when I open them
    And then he screams.
    At first, it is into the soft white towel, and then he lifts his head and a high-pitched howl escapes into the air.  Raising himself off the floor, he finds his face in the mirror and continues screaming.  He doesn’t care how ridiculous he looks.  He doesn’t care that his face is turning crimson.  He doesn’t care if his stitches pop and blood splatters across the mirror or that the words frozen in his brain leak onto her immaculate floors.
    Hope my mom and I hope my dad
    Will figure out why they get so mad
    Hear them scream, I hear them fight
    They say bad words that make me wanna cry
    They start to bang on the